The Song Fight Bulletin Board

So, artists have Inktober. Now musicians have Novembeat - every day in November, make a short (16-bar-or-so) song and upload it somewhere, and post it tagged with #novembeat. It's a lot of fun.

Here's my output so far:

What a neat idea! I really like the sound of your first four entries Fluffy (0-3), especially #2.

This is happening again this year, by the way. And here is this year's playlist for me:

fluffy, these are awesome.
-bill

Thanks!

BTW I completed it again this year. I’m really happy with how it turned out, despite a few setbacks during the month (which I feel led to some of my best music at least).

In a little while I’m gong to clean it up for an album release on bandcamp and Spotify but feel free to listen to the extant SoundCloud version in the meantime.

I have released a finished album now. http://music.sockpuppet.us/album/novembeat-2017

I listened through a lot of the album and especially liked glowsticks and still around. You'll have to mention this before next november if you think about it.

So hey, I finally got around to setting up a website for Novembeat.

Novembeat! I've done NaSoAlMo a couple of times in November but this sounds better suited to the reduced amount of free time / energy I have these days, so I'm tempted to have a go. I've been meaning to get more into making music on mobile devices too and this seems like a good way to get my head into that.

Is there a music-related competition for every month?

FAWM for February
Novembeat and NaSoAIMo for November

What else is there?

November also has Notevember, which started last year, despite me pointing out to the people running it that it was exactly the same as Novembeat which had been going for a few years (and is at least somewhat different than NaSoAlMo). November is really popular for it because of Inktober jealousy I think.

There's the RPM Challenge (Record Production Month) in February too. I think it's more focused on recording than FAWM, so you could do new recordings of pre-written songs in February for the RPM challenge, but FAWM is all about writing. I think TC was also running an Album Production Challenge on Facebook post-FAWM, but I can't remember if there was a specific time frame for that one.

There's the FAWM sister site 50/90: write 50 songs in 90 days, which goes for 90 days starting from the 4th of July. (I'm 49 days in and have only written 2 songs so far, one of which was "The Supper Club"...)

Another sister challenge (not sure it has its own site, it might just be hosted as part of 50/90?), Rocktober, is all about recording covers through the month of October.

So if you count Nur Ein (April-June) and Spintunes (October-December), that leaves just January and March not covered (yet) by music challenges that I know of--aside from Song Fight, of course.

What would you want to see filling in the gaps?

Here are a few ideas:

MONOMANIA MARCH

• One-take month--do a single-take recording every day for a month
• One-song month--record at least five new versions of the same song in a month. (Vom has been doing sort of this, on a much longer timeframe, with a cover per year of Justin Timberlake's "Cry Me a River" since 2007)
• New instrument month--record fifteen songs on an instrument you don't normally play. Could be one you're just learning to play, or something you bought that hasn't gotten enough love.

DO IT BETTER DECEMBER

• Performance month--do ten videos, livestreams, or live performances during the course of the month
• Practice month--spend at least thirty minutes a day practicing, no exceptions, no distractions, every single day. This maybe isn't a "fun" one but probably super useful for a lot of people--I try to play at least a little bit every day but because I'm a grownup with shit to do, that doesn't always happen.

ok anyway just wanted to share that novembeat, which I've been posting about on this thread since 2016, now has a website instead of just a twitter hashtag, because people kept on asking me where the website was.

Is Jamuary a thing?

January has "Fun-A-Day" which is what got Jonathan Mann started doing a song a day, and now starting this year he's trying to start his own spinoff "Jamuary" which is specifically about writing a song every day in January (Fun-A-Day is just about making any kind of art, not specifically songs).

Doh, yeah, we're off topic. I'll start a new topic.

Oh and of course I completely forgot to write what I started to comment about, which is that I like the Novembeat site, I'm glad you have it up! Easy to navigate and figure out what the heck it is and how to listen to stuff in a minute or two.

Thanks! I built it in Publ, and you can view the site repository at https://github.com/fluffy-critter/novembeat.com if you're curious as to how it's put together.

Reminder that it's November and therefore Novembeat time!

I want to do this but I think it's totally unrealistic for me to set out to do it. I will probably fail to do it even today, the first day. Doh!

I posted the link in the #keyboard-nerds Slack channel at work in case anybody was looking for a prompt to make stuff every day today.

You don't have to do it every day, and you don't have to make a song each day. It's all about experimenting and doing what you can.

Also here's my playlist for this year:

Oh cool! Nice to know I don't have to do it every day. I managed to make something tonight anyway though I also ignored the 16 bar max thing. Doh! Anyway, I wired up my volca beats, volca keys, and pocket operator po-20, and actually managed to make a little jam that didn't sound like complete crap in my opinion. I played back sequences on them and recorded and "performed" by twiddling knobs and playing some live lead on the keys. I then did some processing and mixing and added some reverb in Cubase. It was fun! I'm adding stuff to a playlist here: